My wife called him her “Sombrita,” her shadow, always right behind her and panicked the moment she was out of his sight. He was a three kilo black Pomeranian we had bought as a baby from a breeder in Arkansas. He was also almost an afterthought, my wife deciding that Osito, our first black Pom from the same breeder, would need a companion, someone else to play with as we went about our busy lives.

We lived in DUMBO, in Brooklyn when he joined us, my wife Patty and I not yet married. I was older, forty-five, when we first met, a confirmed bachelor living alone in a 1,200 sf loft I had bought with money I’d made working at Microsoft. Like our relationship, DUMBO was also in the early stages of development, a sparsely populated industrial wonderland where Great Danes were still more common than baby strollers, a New York neighbourhood that embodied the unconscious idea that the size of your pet reflected the size of your apartment.

As unoriginal as it sounds now, when Patty and I met I wanted a Great Dane. I had grown up with labs, and considered small dogs an insult to my masculinity. But I was in love with Patty and agreed to “think about” adopting a Pomeranian, in exchange for it being black, and that I would have naming rights. We went online and looked at mug shots of hundreds of black Pomeranians.

And there, smiling back at me, was a Pom named Marco.

I was instantly smitten. He looked like a little bear. Later, when he came home to us, I asked my wife, who is Peruvian, what the word for “little bear” is in Spanish. And so we named him Osito.

Osito adapted quickly to life in DUMBO, but because Patty and I both had full-time jobs, he was also home alone for nine to ten hours a day in the apartment. We bought a video cam to watch him and, not surprisingly, with nothing else to do he basically slept all day. He needed someone to play with. So, a few months after Osi arrived we contacted the breeder, who told us she had the perfect companion. Where Osi was first of the litter, independent and demanding, this Pom was last of the litter and, the breeder told us, a “natural follower.” He was called Baron. My wife promptly renamed him Humphrey Bogart.

I will never forget the night Humphrey came home to us. Patty put him on her chest and they lay on the sofa all night so he could bond with her by feeling her heartbeat. When I came out of the bedroom in the morning I found them the same as I had left them, Patty having stayed awake all night to ensure Humphrey didn’t tumble off her chest. The bond between them was instant and enduring. From that day forward, if anyone came too close to Patty, like trying to hug or kiss her, Humphrey would bite them, not hard but just hard enough that they knew he meant business. If Patty took a shower, Humphrey found a nitch in the corner of the shower and laid down waiting for her, damp but undeterred. When Patty worked out, Humphrey found a space on her crash mat to sleep. Given that Patty is a competitive pole dancer, this usually meant Humphrey slept beneath Patty’s spinning body. I have never seen another being with such a sense of trust as Humphrey had for her.

It may be a cliche to call your pets your children, but for a consciously childless couple of a certain age, Osito and Humphrey embodied love’s infinite capacity to adapt one’s life to the needs of another. I remember early on yelling at Humphrey because he’d peed on one of the legs of my fancy white dining table. “We only have a short time with them,” my wife admonished me. “If you need to yell, yell at me. Just never yell at the Poochies again.” And so, along with a total lack of discipline, we gave Osi and Humphrey the life we aspired to and, in return, they gave us a unique kind of freedom, exempting us from the undue pressure exerted by certain family members and other married people to procreate. Biologically untethered, Patty and I dedicated our free time to the Poochies. We saw our lives as a shared adventure, and the fact that our dogs were so small opened up a whole new world of possibilities. Wherever we went, the Poochies went with us, eventually traveling so much they had to get their own passports. They visited Lima, Perú (seven times), Tepoztlán, Mexico and Mexico City,

L.A. and San Diego, Chicago, Miami, Quebec and Puerto Rico. They celebrated Christmas in Prague, Berlin and Barcelona, nibbled on Croque Monsieurs at the Deux Maggots in Paris, sampled our Goulash in Budapest, attended the Pope’s blessing at the Vatican Square in Rome, rode a gondola in Venice, and peed on the (duplicate) statue of David in Florence. They toured Lisbon by tuk-tuk, dined with a celebrity chef in East Berlin, saw Amsterdam by bike, hiked the Pyrenees mountains in our arms, ran through the sprinklers of Madrid’s El Retiro Parc, and called Brooklyn, Woodstock and Barcelona, Spain, where we live now, their homes.

Probably the greatest tragedy for most dog owners is knowing how little time they actually have with their pet. If we’re lucky, they’ll occupy about a fifth of our lifetime. Humphrey passed not long after his fifteenth birthday. At the time he was being treated ìn a veterinary hospital for pneumonia. He’d struggled for several years with a collapsed trachea, which often made it hard for him to breathe and caused severe bouts of coughing. He’d spent a week in the hospital when we were told he’d gotten better and would be able to come home. The day before he died, Humphrey stood outside his oxygen tent and licked each of our faces, including Osi’s. We didn’t realise then that this was his way of saying goodbye.

Pets, especially dogs, are easy to anthropomorphise—we like to think of them in human terms without fully grasping how wonderfully unknowable to us they are as animals. For instance, Humphrey and Osi, although closely related, seemed less friends than begrudging bedfellows. Yet, one day in the park when they were pups a much larger dog grabbed Humphrey by the neck and started tossing him around like a rag doll. Humphrey began screeching and out of nowhere Osi streaked across the lawn and, like a dolphin attacking a shark, launched himself head-first into the much bigger dog’s chest, dislodging Humphrey from his jaws and sending the other dog tumbling. As Osi stood barking like a crazed lunatic over the much bigger dog it just looked at Osi like, What the fuck, man!, and walked away. Now a full three months after Humphrey passed, Osi still sleeps in Humphrey’s bed and appears to wait for him by the door. I’m no animal psychologist, but it’s pretty clear Osi misses him.

Humphrey had the saddest eyes, yet he may have been the happiest, most curious being I have ever known. There was no malice, no ambivalence in him, just a purity of purpose that was innocent and intense. When Patty would leave on business trips he would lay with his nose under the front door for days, waiting to catch a whiff of her return. I think of him chasing leaves with a singular focus on a beautiful Fall day as the wind seemed to blow his little body around our property in Woodstock, or tightrope-walking the top of the couch and watching the neighbours outside the windows, as he loved to do, especially as he got older and more gossipy, or running in circles so fast as a puppy when he tried to turn he would literally roll over on himself. Humphrey was curious about everything. If something or someone interested him he would tilt his head to the side, appearing to scrutinise the situation, and then usually break into a smile filled with such mischievous innocence it just made you know everything was going to be fine.

The loss of a pet is, unfortunately, an inevitable part of most of our lives. We were fortunate to have our lives made forever better by such a beautiful little being.

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